UN Honoree Assails World's Indifference

After being honored with a U.N. human rights prize in New York Wednesday, Mukwege said the world should do more to end the conflict in Democratic Republic of Congo that has killed and displaced millions of people over a decade.

"The crisis that is happening in Congo is treated with with unimaginable hypocrisy," Mukwege told Reuters in an interview in French after the awards ceremony.

"Everyone knows. More than 5 million dead, and everybody knows. Reports say 50,000 to 60,000 women raped every year."

Mukwege said rape was used both as a weapon of war by individual soldiers and a "strategy of war" by groups determined to destroy communities and drive people from their land. "It is done with an element of spectacle, in public, in front of everyone -- with humiliation," Mukwege said.

Mukwege said the international community should address the root cause of the conflict, a struggle for natural resources.

"If the international community put pressure on the actors of the war in the Great Lakes region, it could stop immediately," Mukwege said. "It's not a civil war, it's not an ideological war, it's more an economic war."

About Me

David grew up in Ibadan, Abidjan, and Montreal. He is based in Kinshasa where he works on a public health project. He has published articles and essays on the Congo in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, The New Republic, Dissent, and elsewhere.